Hardware

EventGhost is an open-source automation tool for MS Windows, that can be extended through plugins. It can use different input devices like infrared or wireless remotes to trigger macros, that on their part control a computer and its attached hardware. After the user has configured everything to its needs, the program will run silently in the system tray and waits for an event to arrive. So it can be used to control a Media-PC with a normal consumer remote for example.

Now, not all applications (or, more precisely, important operations of an application) are amenable to parallelization. True, some problems, such as compilation, are almost ideally parallelizable. But others aren’t; the usual counterexample here is that just because it takes one woman nine months to produce a baby doesn’t imply that nine women could produce one baby in one month.